'I Aimed For The Public's Heart, And. . .hit It In The Stomach'

'The Jungle' Was A Socialist's Cry For Labor Justice. It Launched A Consumer Movement Instead.

May 21, 2006|By Eric Schlosser. Excerpted from the Penguin Deluxe Classics Edition of "The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair. Copyright (c) 2006 by Eric Schlosser. Reprinted by arrangment with Penguin Classics, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Eric Schlosser is the author of "Fast Food Nation" and "Chew on This." He has written for The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker and other publications.

Published as weekly installments in the Appeal to Reason, the novel was popular among socialists. When it appeared as a book in February 1906--published by Doubleday, Page after Macmillan rejected it for being too graphic--"The Jungle" quickly became an international best seller. Foreign critics, such as Winston Churchill, praised the book's critique of unchecked greed in the United States. American readers, however, responded in a way that Sinclair had not expected. They were outraged by his account of unsanitary conditions in the nation's slaughterhouses. Sausage made from rancid meat laced with chemicals to disguise the smell; sausage made out of dead rats; beef hearts and other organ meats artificially colored and sold as canned chicken; goat meat sold as lamb; a worker accidentally killed and boiled and turned into lard-although these descriptions filled a small fraction of the book, they dominated the media frenzy surrounding its publication.

One of the most remarkable aspects of American political life a century ago is that the White House was occupied by a Republican pro-business president who loved to read books-even books by socialists like Leo Tolstoy and Upton Sinclair. President Theodore Roosevelt not only read "The Jungle," but thought that much of what it described seemed accurate. He was wary of the concentrated economic power that the trusts represented and felt that the beef trust, in particular, was capable of unscrupulous behavior. While serving as an officer during the Spanish-American War, he'd been appalled by the poor quality of the canned meats sold to the War Department and served to his troops in Cuba. It was widely believed that such "embalmed beef" had killed more American soldiers than Spanish bullets did.

At Roosevelt's request, two separate investigations were conducted. The first, led by officials at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, concluded that Sinclair was responsible for "willful and deliberate misrepresentation of fact" and had exaggerated the problems in the meatpacking industry. Suspicious of the USDA's close ties to the beef trust, Roosevelt secretly asked a pair of trusted advisors, Charles P. Neill, the U.S. commissioner of labor, and James B. Reynolds, a New York social worker, to visit slaughterhouses in Chicago and assess the accuracy of Sinclair's claims. Reynolds and Neill witnessed sanitary conditions that were far from ideal. "In a word," the two reported, "we saw meat shoveled from filthy wooden floors, piled on tables rarely washed, pushed from room to room in rotten box carts, in all of which processes it was in the way of gathering dirt, splinters, floor filth, and the expectorations of tuberculous and other diseased workers." They saw workers urinating on the floor near the meat. They saw canned meat that was two years old being relabeled and sold as new. Their report convinced Roosevelt that Upton Sinclair was right.

Roosevelt used the controversy and public outrage inspired by "The Jungle" to seek passage of two important pieces of legislation: the Pure Food and Drugs Act and the Meat Inspection Act. Both promised an unprecedented expansion of federal power, allowing the government to regulate the safety and purity of food transported across state lines. Both were vehemently opposed by the beef trust and big business. The meat-packing industry attacked Roosevelt and Sinclair, arguing that the federal government should not infringe upon states' rights or interfere with the free market. The states' rights argument was especially appealing to the trusts, since state legislators were much less expensive to bribe than members of Congress. A handful of companies supported Roosevelt's legislation. In their view the absence of government regulation punished firms that tried to behave responsibly and helped those that cut corners, misled consumers, and sold dangerous goods.

In June 1906, four months after the publication of "The Jungle," the Pure Food and Drugs Act and the Meat Inspection Act were passed by Congress. Although industry pressure had watered down some of their provisions, these two bills marked a turning point in the role of the federal government. For the next 75 years, the police power guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution was used to protect ordinary consumers from corporate misbehavior. The federal government assumed the responsibility for ensuring food safety, automobile safety, clean water, clear air. The results were far from perfect, but a new template had been created, one that declared the public interest to be more important than the demands of private interests. Sinclair was disappointed, however, by the impact of "The Jungle." It had been written to help meatpacking workers, not to improve the quality of meat. "I aimed for the public's heart," Sinclair later wrote, "and by accident hit it in the stomach."